This morning, I read an article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education about Michael Ardis, a former faculty member of Morris College, a small historically black school in South Carolina. Ardis was a popular teacher of criminal justice, an MA with an assistant professorship who had been promised a ride on the tenure track if he completed his Ph.D. by 2003. Now he manages a local Domino's, taking orders and tossing dough till the wee hours. Needless to say, the career move was not a voluntary one. Ardis was summarily fired--or, in administrative doublespeak, "not renewed"--during the winter term of 2000. One moment he was teaching a criminal justice seminar, the next his classroom was invaded by a whistling administrator serving him with his walking papers. Why? As Ardis puts it, "I'm a white man who didn't stay in his place."

Ardis was terminated--in violation of college policies on fair notice--shortly after a college trustee witnessed an altercation between Ardis and a waiter at a local restaurant. The waiter--also a Morris student--failed to fill an order for rolls. When Ardis brought the oversight to the waiter's attention, the waiter accused Ardis of racism. The accusation--which Ardis claims is patently false--quickly travelled the campus grapevine. Three days later, he was informed (such things always take place in the passive voice) that he would not be reappointed. The college claims--as colleges always do when they engage in vigilante purging missions--that Ardis' dismissal had nothing to do with the episode at the restaurant. Needless to say, the fact that the waiter/student has since apologized for his inappropriately volatile behavior has not mattered at all. Neither did the petition students (black students) signed in support of Ardis. Ardis filed a lawsuit for breach of contract that goes to trial this week. The place of racism--by which I mean not Ardis' putative racism, but the racism that fueled the summary dismissal, without cause or proper notice, of a popular, dedicated teacher whose only crime was to be an unapologetic white man--in Ardis' case will never be addressed in the courts.

Ardis' story is terrible enough in itself, but it acquires an eerily overdetermined aura when one realizes that it is simply one case among many, one isolated instance of a larger pattern on American campuses in which a distorted concept of reparative justice licenses a crudely programmatic, even pogrammatic, policing of behavior and punishment of perceived wrongs (emphasis on "perceived"--all that matters in such cases is the wounded party's belief that he or she has been injured). An analogous--though less personally devastating--case arose in New York last month when Candace de Russy, a SUNY trustee, candidly expressed her belief that many black studies departments were politically biased and lacking in rigor and ought therefore to be mainstreamed into more traditional disciplines. Such was the outrage at this blasphemy that The United University Professions, SUNY's 27,000 member faculty and staff union, called for her dismissal from the board. Luckily, Stanley Kurtz had a few choice words to say about that.

Yet another incident occurred last fall, when Barry Shain, a political science professor at Colgate, wrote a private email to a student expressing his belief that "too many students of color are seduced into taking exotic courses that make few demands on them rather than those courses that force them to grow emotionally and intellectually. It seems to me that if students of color graduate with inferior written and analytic skills to those of their white colleagues, Colgate faculty are certainly not serving the needs of all of their students." The email was widely publicized, and even read out loud at a public forum called to discuss what to do about the dastardly and insensitive Professor Shain. There were sit-ins and demands that Shain be sanctioned. In the heat of their lust for thought control and enforced conformity, students even demanded that all faculty receive mandatory sensitivity training. After all, additional hate speech like Shain's has to be prevented at all costs. They forgot to silence Linda Chavez, though. Check out her fine display of free speech on the Colgate case.